Other
5.2·
Blender is a free and open-source, cross-platform 3D creation suite developed by the Blender Foundation and the community. It combines modeling, sculpting, rigging, animation, physics simulation, rendering, compositing and video editing in a single application.
In robotics, Blender is used to model and visualize robots, prepare scenes and generate synthetic data for training computer vision and AI models. The Phobos add-on enables creating and exporting robot models in URDF and SDF formats, bridging Blender with ROS pipelines and simulators.
Blender's core is written in C and C++, while scripts and add-ons are built in Python through its built-in API (bpy). It is fully open source under the GNU GPL and available free of charge on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Standalone graphical application (GUI) running locally on a workstation or laptop.
A Visualization Tool is software designed for the visual representation of data originating from a robot, its sensors, the environment, or the control system — such as point clouds, occupancy maps, joint trajectories, camera feeds, or telemetry dashboards. In robotics, widely used examples include RViz (ROS), Foxglove Studio, and Webviz, which allow real-time and post-hoc inspection of sensor streams and system state.
Simulation software is used for modelling, testing, and validating robot behaviours, sensor characteristics, environments, and algorithms without requiring physical hardware. It enables safe, repeatable, and cost-effective development cycles. Common robotics simulators include Gazebo, Isaac Sim (NVIDIA), MuJoCo, PyBullet, and Webots, each offering different trade-offs between physics accuracy, rendering fidelity, and integration with middleware frameworks such as ROS 2.
The open-source Blender 3D suite together with add-ons and plugins used in robotics for modeling, synthetic data generation and visualization.
A family of open-source operating systems based on the Linux kernel, common on servers, in the cloud and in robotics.
Minimum requirements per official documentation; recommended: 8-core CPU, 32 GB RAM, 8 GB VRAM.
Strong copyleft license. Permits use, modification and distribution provided derivative works are released under the same terms with source code made available.
Stable release in the 5.x series.
Redesigned interface, real-time EEVEE render engine and a new workspaces system.
